A love story can be told in any number of ways. A woman with a big diamond and a cheating husband meet a huge monster from out of space; or, a husband with a blonde lover plans to skim some of the money of his rich wife, who in turn, runs around town screaming that she just saw a spaceship with a huge hand coming out of it; or, a 50ft tall alien is attacking a disgruntled wife looking for her large diamond to power off his spaceship; or, a blonde woman…you get the point.

A movie can be told in any number of ways. Image, sound and text come together to create a unity of fragments. Or, one can read the script and nothing more. One can turn down the volume; let the images tell the tale. Or vice versa, pump up the volume and forget the picture. The last option is the one we choose…

The disassociation of the visual and the sound elements allows each sound to exist in its own right in a very indirect liaison with the image. This in return affords the listener a way to create his or her own pictures. What one sees is not what one hears, what one hears is not what one sees. One cannot divine a person’s physical appearance on the basis of a voice, but one is provided with a more interior, less regulated truth.

The sound fails to reveal the action. On the stage a minimal décor and few movements do not help in clarifying the story either. The sound mixes cars, screaming woman, a 50th sci-fi sounds, a blonde, bar music, a sheriff and his deputy, an evil husband and so on. All the sounds that one needs to tell a Hollywood story. Yet they do not indicate a location or a social milieu but serve like elements of a musical score, words among other words, sounds among other sounds. The listener has to put the sounds together; the stage images do not always help in decoding the soundtrack, sometimes they serve more as alternative reading than a translation.

As far as love stories go, »The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman« is banal; a triangle of the common sort, i.e., a rich woman with a very expensive diamond and a bad temper is cheated by her no good husband and his greedy blonde, out of town, girlfriend. The blonde aspect is important, as we all know gentlemen prefer blondes. But, the twist to the story has nothing to do with love but with a more urgent question concerning fuel shortage and alternative form of energy. It turns out the big man from out of space needs the big diamond, the star of India, to power his spaceship and when he uses his big hand to take the big diamond the disgruntled wife turns into a very big wife herself. What start out as very simple love story ends up being a very big love story indeed.

Follow the big transformation of the wife into a 50 ft woman and the conclusion is clear; for woman the only alternative to looking ridiculous is looking monstrous.